Change to completing-read-multiple

[bdarcus]

The bibtex-completion functions all take multiple keys as input, and
some of them (notably the "input" ones) lose functionality without
support for this.

Hence, this changes the core read function to use
'completing-read-multiple'.

In order to do that, it also sets the crm-separator to ampersand, since
default comma won't work for these data.

Addresses #17.

see oantolin/embark#176 (comment)

[Yevgnen]

Hi, at a quick glance, without UI changes of selectrum, I thinks it's a bit hard to achieve (better UE).

I see that selectrum-completing-read-multiple overrides completing-read-multiple.

I've thought maybe we could insert the bibtex keys (which are much shorter) as selected items but selectrum seems insert the candidate (which is the formated citation) directly with no possible transformation.

Personally, selecting multiple items in minibuffer is not that convenient for me. I prefer to show only 7~10 items in minibuffer due to a limited display. I used to use ivy-mark to selecting multiple items but I rarely used it. Whether to keep the selected items in the top is also another UE issue. Operating multiple items in a separate buffer like ivy-occur or embark-collect seems much better for me. I see that helm-bibtex seems use a large window to display window to display bibtex items, I think it works closely like working in a separate buffer. But the difference is, one need to keep the 'input session' for selecting items when using helm-bibtex, but working in a separator need not.

Maybe I'm wrong since I'm not a very experience user in ivy and helm.

How do you think?

[bdarcus]

I agree the current multiple select UI in selectrum is not well suited to this ATM.

I've thought maybe we could insert the bibtex keys (which are much shorter) as selected items but selectrum seems insert the candidate (which is the formated citation) directly with no possible transformation.

Yes, that's correct. If you haven't already, see radian-software/selectrum#489.

The idea @clemera suggested there would be a huge improvement.

radian-software/selectrum#489 (comment)

The changes to the function I pushed last night, which are almost working, were suggested by the embark author. He thinks it should work fine with embark, and so also the ivy-occur-like embark-collect.

But we still need to use multiple in order for that to work.

If you select four items in the collect buffer, and run insert-bibtex, this should correctly work. Otherwise, you'd have to separately run the command four times, and likely manually deal with the formatting that the commands handle instead.

[bdarcus]

This actually now should work. You just have to use the ampersand separator instead of comma.

[bdarcus]

FYI, embark integration doesn't generate errors, @oantolin, but also doesn't generate correct output with multiple selections.

If I select two candidates, for example, and run embark-act, only one gets output.

Is there something else I need to do so embark knows how to handle the custom crm-separator? I was assuming, based on what you wrote earlier, that this should just work.

[bdarcus]

I merged this. We can test further and see if we can figure out the embark piece.